The local town father snarled and exploded into the bathroom where
Billy Margram was just pulling his arm down from the air above the shower
head.

During the preceding few years Billy had descended through one then another of
numerous crash pad rooms of opportunity until he had ultimately become the
hamlet's sole street urchin spending most of his time smoking and drinking
behind the town toilet.

It was a rare moment for him to be out of the cold and cleaning up a bit.

His final washing.

If not firmly final, the beating was swift and brutal enough for the crashes and
shouts of anger to be heard by neighbors in the adjoining apartment and
outdoors, "This time Billy, you are going to learn to not steal."

A week later Billy, this kid who only hoped to get his life together and become
a police officer, was found dead on the street and nobody ever bothered to put
together the proximity of the beating (and his bloodied nose) with the time of
his death.

It was that kind of town.

A few years before that, on an evening two weeks before Christmas,
Clay Boone was left in charge of his younger brother while his parents went to chorale.

He heard firecrackers outside and knew it was his duty to check.

In the husky evening light teenage Clay descended the porch and turned right
toward the local gathering place, a grocery store deli with a few arcade games,
but he was jolted to halt seeing a figure lying on the ground just a few yards from his
front door.

The woman was dead, shot by her husband who was still in the phone booth outside
the far corner of the deli explaining to the police, "Just took out my old
lady, and I won't be taken alive."

Whether the guy was stating his actual plans or merely his assumed expectations neither
disappointed.

The first police officer to arrive was only told of some sort of domestic
dispute in Sugar Loaf, so he stepped unaware out of his cruiser and directly
into a .22 shell between the eyes. [1]

Almost immediately a large cadre of local police swarmed the spot with a furious
resplendent swirl of red, white, and blue patchwork putting the
hamlet's Christmas
lighting to shame.

They unleashed a torrent of gunfire that left only small pieces
of bone and flesh for the kids (Clay among them) to find the next morning while
they stood by the phone booth waiting for the school bus.

Years later local artisans would point to bullets in the walls of their shops
and recount the horror.

It was that kind of town.

The kind of town where the first murder for hire in the United States could (and
did) occur—but that was much earlier and
outside the scope of this writing.

Suffice it say nobody expected such a broiling cauldron of rundown decrepit houses and stupidly dangerous tension to become
a
crucible producing some of the finest art and creative products the world has
seen, but it has.

09/19/15 update:
Today a routine review of this story reminded me that the photo of Billy
Margram above was actually screen grabbed from Jay Westerveld's Sugar Loaf
Historical Society website before it went offline. The plan was to show Jay
how easily supposed "protected" images are grabbed, and then put a link from
the photo to his website. Unfortunately, soon after the story on this page
was posted, I came under heavy attack from all quarters hoping to quell
the Margram story. Red herrings were thrown toward the Sugar Loaf Guild
Forum, as if a few salty words were what people had a problem with, not the
unresolved story of Billy Margram along with some other uncomfortable
observations of fact on the Guild website. Due to the three year uproar I
forgot to come back to this page and set things straight. Also I was
recently told that the manner in which I recounted Billy's story was far less horrible than the actual event. Apparently
Billy was beaten for stealing somebody's dog which he did to provide himself
a little night warmth on the frigid cold bone-bursting merciless winter
street (again), and he was actually found dead not on that street (as I
said) but in the actual
shower where the beating took place. The EMT who was reported to have recovered the
body was much later killed in a motorcycle accident, and the building was
more recently demolished, so don't even think there can ever be closure
here. God forgive this little town and everyone in it ... and I don't even
believe in deities which is why I do believe I will finally be lynched for my
involvement spreading this truth, and the lynching will occur under the
guise of retribution for a few dozen or so of the 10,000 lies currently
being circulated about me. Fuck.